by Nancy Reagan
I was furious at Helmut Kohl for not getting us out of it, and again I urged Ronnie to cancel the visit. I wasn’t alone: Fifty-three senators and almost four hundred members of the House asked Ronnie not to go. But the previous November, in the Oval Office, Ronnie had given his word to Kohl, and he felt duty-bound to honor his commitment. He also felt strongly that it was time to put the past behind us—not to forget what had happened, but to move forward into a new era.
In the end, of course, Ronnie went to Bitburg, and I went with him. We stayed there for only a few minutes, but even so, it seemed like an eternity.
And yet I was also proud of Ronnie for following his conscience, for doing what he believed was right. Bitburg was a gesture of reconciliation, and he was determined to go through with it.
I was somewhat more successful in encouraging Ronnie to consider a more conciliatory relationship with the Soviet Union. For years it had troubled me that my husband was always being portrayed by his opponents as a warmonger, simply because he believed, quite properly, in strengthening our defenses. Jimmy Carter had made this charge in the 1980 campaign, and it stuck to Ronnie for years.
Now that Ronald Reagan is out of office, even his critics acknowledge that his policy of peace through strength turned out to be an enormous success.
I knew that “warmonger” was never a fair description of Ronnie’s position, but I also felt that his calling the Soviet Union an evil empire was not particularly helpful in establishing a dialogue with the other side. The world had become too small for the two superpowers not to be on speaking terms, and unless that old perception about Ronnie could be revised, nothing positive was likely to happen. Some of his advisers wanted him to keep up the tough rhetoric, but I argued against it and suggested that he tone it down. As always, Ronnie listened to various points of view and then made the decision that he thought was best.
In most good marriages that I know of, the woman is her husband’s closest friend and adviser. There are limits to that role, of course. But when the president returns each afternoon from the West Wing, it’s only natural that he’ll talk things over with the person he’s closest to, and that he’ll take her viewpoint into consideration.
Historically, there has always been a certain amount of tension between the West Wing, where the president works, and the East Wing, where he and his wife live, and where the first lady has her office. The West Wing has traditionally seen itself as the sole center of power, and the men surrounding the president have resented any assertion of independence and autonomy on the part of the first lady.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. It would be far better, and more realistic, if the president’s men included the first lady as part of their team. After all, nobody knows the president better than his wife. The president has a host of advisers to give him counsel on foreign affairs, the economy, politics, and everything else. But not one of these people is there to look after him as an individual with human needs, a man of flesh and blood who must deal with the pressures of holding the most powerful position on earth.
And if my experience was typical, the first lady is often exposed to perspectives and viewpoints that the president never gets to hear. Time after time I was approached by White House aides and elected officials who gave me valuable information, warnings, and insights.
“I wish you’d go in and tell my husband,” I’d say. But something happens to people when they walk into the Oval Office. They just freeze up, and they tell the president only what they think he wants to hear. There are times when his wife may be the only person who can be honest with him. If he’s lucky, and when it’s necessary, she’ll be able to tell him the bad news. Or at least give him another point of view.
Every situation is different, of course, and every couple living in the White House must work out its own arrangement. President Carter liked to have Rosalynn sitting in on Cabinet meetings, whereas Ronnie and I would have found that embarrassing. And yet I learned only recently that it was Rosalynn Carter who suggested to her husband in 1978 that he invite Prime Minister Begin and President Sadat to meet with him at Camp David. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that other recent first ladies were far more helpful and involved than the public ever knew.
But however the first lady fits in, she has a unique and important role to play in looking after her husband. And it’s only natural that she’ll let him know what she thinks. I always did that for Ronnie, and I always will.
5
Nancy Davis
I LEARNED a lot about how to be a wife, and about many other things, from my mother, Edith Luckett Davis. She had a profound influence on the woman I turned out to be, as did her second husband, Dr. Loyal Davis, whom I have always considered my true father.
They were very different—opposites, really—and the different worlds they represented made for great contrasts and enormous changes during the first ten years of my life. My mother’s world was the theater; she was an actress and a real character—fun-loving, social, irrepressible, and irresistible. Loyal Davis, a prominent Chicago neurosurgeon, was serious, dignified, and principled.
Before I was ten, I had lived in three completely different environments: as a baby, going from theater to theater with my mother; then living a small-town life as a little girl, with my aunt and uncle in Bethesda; and finally, moving into the socially prominent world of Loyal Davis in Chicago. Every period of my life has been marked by dramatic changes, and as I’ll explain, these early years were no exception.
Mother always said that I was supposed to be born on the Fourth of July, but the Yankees were playing a doubleheader that day (Mother was living in New York), and she was such a passionate baseball fan that she delayed my birth until July 6.
In 1917 she had married a man named Kenneth Robbins, a Princeton graduate from a well-to-do family that had lost its money. He wasn’t very ambitious, and he worked as a car salesman in New Jersey. It wasn’t a good marriage, and by the time I was born their relationship was so tenuous that Kenneth Robbins wasn’t even at the hospital. They were soon divorced.
When Mother arrived at the hospital to give birth to me, they told her there were no rooms.
“No rooms?” she said. “Then I guess I’ll have to lie right down on the floor of this lobby and have my baby here!”
They found her a room.
I was christened Anne Frances Robbins after my two grandmothers, but for some reason I was always called Nancy.
I don’t remember the name of the hospital where I was born. It burned down years ago, but there’s no truth to the rumor that I set that fire to destroy any records that might reveal my age. When Ronnie was president, every year on July 6 there would be a story in one of the papers about how Nancy Reagan says she was born in 1923, but we all know she was really born two years earlier.
When, exactly, was I born? I still haven’t made up my mind. Besides, as Mother used to say, “A woman who will tell her age will tell anything.”
The age game actually began when I moved to Hollywood in the late 1940s and signed a film contract with MGM. In those days, almost no actress in the entire studio admitted to being over twenty-five. Years later, when Ronnie and I had to fill out some forms, I realized that I had actually forgotten my true age, and I had to ask him what it was.
According to Mother, I was born on a very warm day—before air-conditioning. The last thing my mother remembered hearing before they put her out was the doctor saying, “My, it’s hot in here. Let’s finish up so I can go out and play some golf.”
It was a forceps delivery, and maybe the doctor did rush a little. When they brought me in, Mother was horrified: The skin on my right temple was broken, and my right eye was still closed.
“If it doesn’t open in two weeks,” the doctor said, “your child could be blind in that eye.”
“Listen,” Mother replied. “I heard what you said. You rushed through the delivery so you could go play golf. If my little girl’s eye doesn’t open, so help me God, I�
��m going to kill you!”
Knowing Mother, I wouldn’t have put it past her.
Fortunately, my eye did open, but to this day I have a tiny scar from the forceps on the right side of my face.
Mother had been born in Petersburg, Virginia, the youngest of nine children. Her father, Charles Edward Luckett, worked for the Adams Express company, which later became the Railway Express. He was transferred to Washington, but his wife, Sarah, was such a staunch Southerner that each time she became pregnant, she went back to Virginia to have the baby, saying, “I refuse to give birth to any damn Yankees!”
Mother’s career on the stage began in 1900, when she was three. Her brother Joe was the manager of the Columbia Theater in Washington, and when a child in one of the productions became ill, Uncle Joe put his baby sister in as the substitute. Little Edith had no speaking lines, and her only task was to die on stage. But she did it so convincingly that the audience was in tears. As the curtain came down, she stood up and waved to the crowd, to let them know she wasn’t really dead.
Mother claimed that when the audience responded with great applause, she decided on the spot to devote her life to the theater.
Her next big break came ten years later, when Chauncey Olcott, the very popular singer and composer of the classic “My Wild Irish Rose,” came to town to perform in Uncle Joe’s theater. Olcott’s accompanist fell ill the day before the concert, and Uncle Joe asked Edith if she could accompany Olcott in “My Wild Irish Rose.” Mother was beside herself with excitement—even though she didn’t know how to play the piano. She bought a toy piano and stayed up all night learning to play the song. Eventually she quit school and spent the rest of her teenage years working in stock companies that traveled up and down the East Coast, going on to perform with many of the great actors and actresses of the day: with George M. Cohan in Broadway Jones, with Spencer Tracy in The Baby Cyclone, and in other productions with Walter Huston and Louis Calhern. They were all her friends, but none more than Alla Nazimova, a legendary star of the silent movies, who had studied in Moscow with Stanislavski himself before she came to America, and who became my godmother.
Many of Mother’s friends left the stage to work in Hollywood, but Edie continued on the stage and became the leading lady in several out-of-town stock companies. She gave up her career when she married, but after the divorce she went back on the stage, and I spent the first two years of my life as a backstage baby.
Mother took me everywhere. Her friend Colleen Moore once described how she met my mother—at a big party on Long Island at the home of Dick and Daisy Rowland. (Rowland was head of First National Studios, and Colleen was one of his stars.) “One of the women caught my eye,” Colleen said. “She was a beautiful blonde, and she had the biggest blue eyes you ever saw. And she was carrying a tiny baby in her arms.”
Colleen asked Rowland who the woman was, and then said, “Does she always go to parties with a baby in her arms?”
“She has no choice,” Dick replied. “She just got divorced and she doesn’t have a penny.”
Colleen was impressed. “I made a point of getting to know your mother,” she said, “and we have been friends ever since.” And they were—such good friends that I later asked Colleen to be godmother to my own daughter, Patti.
Mother decided that traipsing around with me from show to show wasn’t a good idea; she wanted me to enjoy a more normal childhood. And so, when I was out of diapers, she brought me to Bethesda, Maryland, to live with her sister Virginia, Virginia’s husband, Audley Galbraith, who worked as a railroad shipping clerk, and their daughter, Charlotte. The Galbraiths had a warm, stable, and happy household, and they quickly accepted me as part of the family. Charlotte was three years older than I, and before long we were as close as any true sisters.
I’ve always been annoyed at the armchair psychologists who claim that I was “abandoned” by my mother when she brought me to live in Bethesda. It nearly killed her to do it, but she had to make a living, since she wouldn’t accept alimony. As long as Mother had to work, this was the best possible arrangement.
Even so, it was a painful period for both of us. Years later I came across Mother’s diary from those years, and at the bottom of every page she had written, “How I miss my baby!”
And I missed her—terribly. No matter how kindly you are treated—and I was treated with great love—your mother is your mother, and nobody else can fill that role in your life.
Maybe our six-year separation is one reason I appreciated her so much, and why we never went through a period of estrangement. It may also explain why, years later, during the 1960s, I couldn’t really understand how children—including my own—could turn against their parents. I always wanted to say, “You don’t know how lucky you are that we had all those years together.”
At the age of five, I came down with double pneumonia—or “double ammonia,” as I called it—which in those days was often fatal. My aunt and uncle took wonderful care of me, but I was angry that Mother was a thousand miles away in a touring company. I remember crying and saying, “If I had a little girl, I’d certainly be there if she was ever sick.”
For some reason, my aunt repeated that comment to my mother. Later, when I had children of my own, I realized how much my words must have hurt her.
In terms of age, Virginia was Mother’s closest sibling, but in almost every other respect the two sisters were classic opposites. Mother was not only outgoing and gregarious; she was also capable of uttering words that would shock a sailor, and was one of the few women I’ve ever known who could tell an off-color joke and have it come out funny. My aunt, on the other hand, was so modest that I’m sure she went into the bathroom to undress at night, and so proper that she called her husband “Mr. Galbraith” until the day he died.
Despite the pain of being separated from Mother, I was happy living with the Galbraiths. Aunt Virgie and Uncle Audley were good to me, and Charlotte and I were always close. I even had a boyfriend, who came to the house each morning while we were eating breakfast, and who used to pull me around the block in his little red wagon.
We lived in Battery Park, a modest section of Bethesda, in a typical suburban house—three small bedrooms and a screened-in porch with a lumpy old couch where we’d all sit on warm summer evenings. One of our neighbors had a cinder driveway, and I fell down there so often that my aunt had to make me kneepads. I was chubby, and with those kneepads, I must have been quite a sight. But that little boy with the red wagon didn’t seem to mind!
I was a real little girl. I loved to play with dolls and to give them tea parties on the front steps of the house. I wonder whether I was preparing even then for the life I was someday going to lead as first lady—half a century later, of course, but less than ten miles away. I’m told I was taken to the White House for the Easter egg roll, but I have no memory of that.
My favorite times were when Mother had a job in New York, and Aunt Virgie would take me by train to stay with her. Although I saw her productions over and over, I was never bored. In one of the first plays I ever saw, the other characters were so mean to my mother that I burst into tears. Later, when I went backstage, I refused to talk to anybody in the cast because I thought they had been so mean to Mother. Finally, she had to take me aside and explain, “Nancy, it’s just make-believe. The other actors were only pretending not to like me.”
I quickly came to love the special feel and the musty smell of backstage. One of the stagehands built me a doll house, which I brought back to Bethesda on the train and used as a backdrop to act out my own little plays.
On those visits with Mother, I loved to dress up in her stage clothes, put on makeup, and pretend I was playing her parts. I would have given anything to have long blond curls, and when Mother bought me a Mary Pickford wig I was in heaven. Between the wig and those kneepads, I must have been gorgeous.
I always dreaded the end of my visits, when I had to leave Mother again. When she wasn’t staying in a residential hotel, she
would live in the brownstone apartment of a friend who was traveling with some other show. To this day, I still get a sinking feeling in my stomach whenever I’m in New York and pass one of those buildings. Strange, how little things can trigger memories buried deep inside.
Sometimes Mother would visit me in Bethesda. Whenever she swooped in on us, it was as if Auntie Mame herself had come to town. We all sat around the living room while she held forth about New York, or Atlanta, or wherever she had just been. On one of these visits she taught Charlotte and me the latest dance, the Charleston. Another time she brought us an adorable little wire-haired terrier named Ginger.
Mother loved to tell a story about an actor friend of hers named Spence. Once, when they were in a play together, Mother had bought a new girdle. She wanted to look especially beautiful because a man she liked very much was coming to the performance that night, and he had never seen her on stage.
A few minutes before the show began, she was in her dressing room getting into the new girdle and it got stuck halfway up. She called over to the next dressing room, “Spence! Get in here now and help me!”
Spence rushed in, and when he saw what the problem was, he started laughing.
“Goddamnit, Spence,” she said. “Stop laughing and help me out.”
“I can’t, Lucky,” he said, pretending to struggle with the girdle. “I’m trying, but I can’t make it budge.”
Mother got angry and started yelling, and finally, just as the curtain went up, Spence gave a yank and everything fell into place.
There are two reasons why this story stayed with me. One is that the man Mother wanted to impress that night was Loyal Davis, her future husband—although she didn’t tell me that until years later. The other was that Spence, whose full name was Spencer Tracy, became an important friend of our family and a special help to me in my acting career.